‣ Journalist and cartoonist Joe Sacco spoke with Zach Rabiroff for the Comics Journal one day after the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, reflecting on truth and art during a genocide:
What did you feel, or do you feel, that you as an artist and as a journalist could do in the face of that? Because you’re obviously trying to do something in going back to this and creating another work?
I’ve long given up the notion that anything I do in particular is going to make any kind of change. And you know what? If I had to think that way, I wouldn’t do anything. I do it because it’s the right thing to do and because I feel the need to say it. Do I have more agency in being able to say something than most people? Most people can go to a demo or something like that, or can fulminate with their friends in their living rooms about what’s going on. But I do have somewhat more of a voice than most people do. I need to express it. If I think it’s going to do something positive is another story altogether. What I do think is that over time – I’m not talking about my work specifically – but over time, the work of many people – it might be a small group of people – can be pretty vociferous.
They’ve presented facts. They’ve showed that these things are facts; artists, documentary filmmakers, writers, journalists, a popular front of people basically outlining the same situation. I think it did have an impact over time because perceptions had begun to shift. I’m not saying that 50% or even 20% of Americans were shifting toward really understanding what was going on, but there had been a slight shift. I think this war put it over the edge. I think a lot of younger people not beholden to some of the same things of people my generation were beholden to about the state of Israel, younger people who were not as propagandized, but just viscerally looking at their phones and seeing what was going on, knew in their stomachs that it was wrong. I know people say that you need to learn about the issue and all that. True, but I think the first movement is a visceral one.
‣ The inimitable Imani Perry penned a short text on letter-writing and tactility for Bitter Southerner‘s latest issue:
There is nothing in digital communication that can touch the sensory pleasure of an actual letter. The cheaper the paper, the more I like it. Give me a dollar store notebook sheet, a sliver with the faintest crinkle sound. You’d better use a blue ball point pen, or press softly because ink can make it melt it’s so thin. Pausing will leave a blot. My mother prefers a more solid paper like she prefers cotton percale to jersey. She writes her letters differently from her mother, my grandmother. My grandmother’s letters were squareish. My mother, her daughter, has a flourish that is elegant if often illegible. Mine are self-consciously crafted: of determined loops. Inheritance is inexact.
‣ Many of us have a love-hate relationship with close reading, despite our English teachers’ best efforts. For the Nation, Dan Sinykin reviews a new book that plumbs the practice’s origins in the 1920s and what its popularity says about academic politics:
Seen in this way, close reading, like these other cultural practices, “has no ideological or political implications whatsoever.” Fredric Jameson and Edward Said performed close readings just as Harold Bloom and Allen Tate did. Close reading is simply “a technique of reading that makes an account of the reading process the basis for interpretation.” It entails nothing more than showing one’s work. “We might be tempted to say of ‘showing the work of reading,’ ‘Is that all?’” Guillory writes. “Yes, that is all.” And if that is all—if close reading is nothing more than transforming quotes into evidence to explain how one reaches a certain conclusion about the text—then the technique is not predisposed to formalist analysis and can as easily be put to work (as it routinely is, despite how scholars still talk about it) for historicist ends. One might use close reading to reveal the formal logic behind how Jane Austen creates her characters, just as one might use it to demonstrate how the classicist orderliness of Austen’s novels depends on the slave trade in Antigua and the history of the British Empire.
But, Guillory hastens to note, there is a different kind of politics in close reading: “The distribution of techniques almost always has political causes and consequences.” Against those who foreground close reading’s ideological content, Guillory prioritizes its function in the institutional context of the school. The New Critics, he argues, developed close reading less to disseminate conservative nostalgia for preindustrial organicism and more to shore up the cultural capital of a university education in literary study during a time of mass literacy with a technique designed to analyze particularly difficult literary texts, especially those of the high modernists and the metaphysical poets.
‣ The news that the Qatari government is gifting the Trump administration a plan to use as its Air Force One is astoundingly unethical on multiple levels — and Forbes‘s Jeremy Bogaisky explains some of the hidden motivations behind the exorbitant offering:
Giving the 747-8 to the U.S. would also allow the Qataris to avoid maintenance costs that are only getting higher with the 747 fleet shrinking worldwide and fewer mechanics available who know how to work on them, said John Goglia, a former airline mechanic and member of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. The 2020 sales brochure noted that the plane was due for a landing gear overhaul in 2024 and a 12-year check in 2027. A check in which the airplane and engines are taken apart, typically carried out every six to 12 years, can take months to complete and cost millions of dollars. “The numbers are staggering,” said Goglia.
By contrast, Trump, who’s incensed that Boeing is years behind schedule on a $3.9 billion contract to fit out two 747s to serve as presidential jets, on Tuesday claimed that the Qatari plane would save American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. “Only a FOOL would not accept this gift on behalf of our Country,” Trump wrote on his social-media platform Truth Social.
Aerospace experts aren’t so sure. The plane would need to be stripped down and swept for bugs. Then, unless the administration is willing to accept the risks of lighter security, it would need to be built up to the Air Force’s requirements to serve as an airborne command center, with encrypted communications systems, shielding to protect the electronics from the effects of a nuclear blast and defenses against missiles. That’s a process that Boeing, despite all its delays, is years down the road already with the two planes it began work on in 2018 during Trump’s first term.
‣ Months after 14-year-old Emily Pike was found murdered in Arizona, the state governor has signed a law in her name establishing a special alert for missing Native people, Sejal Govindarao and Susan Montoya Bryan report for AP:
Arizona’s “turquoise alert” legislation is also referred to as “Emily’s Law” to honor Emily Pike, whose remains were found Feb. 14 more than 100 miles (161 kilometers) from a group home she left in Mesa, Arizona, in late January. Pike’s death spurred a resurgence of activism aimed at bringing more awareness to the disproportionate number of disappearances and violent deaths that have gripped Native American communities for decades, and prompted lawmakers to amend the bill to recognize her.
“It breaks my heart that we, the state of Arizona, didn’t even go looking for this little girl. No one looked for her,” said bill sponsor Rep. Teresa Martinez while on the House floor last week. “We cannot let children go missing without somebody being alerted.”
‣ Feast your eyes on 100 book covers of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway — one for every year since its publication. LitHub‘s Emily Temple has the round-up:
There are flowers on Bell’s cover for Mrs. Dalloway, and 100 years later, there are still flowers on almost every design to have graced the book. If there are no flowers, then there must be a woman, usually with a hat, often in repose. The saturated, surprisingly modern yellow with which Bell accented her design is still prevalent. A few have no flowers, nor women, but planes. A few are complete headscratchers.
To celebrate the book’s birthday, I’ve collected a hundred of its covers here. There are probably a hundred more. I have avoided most of the new, e-book only covers; in 2021, the novel entered the public domain, which means that pretty much anyone can sell it on Amazon with a cover they made in Canva. I have been as accurate as possible with publication dates, though sometimes covers are repeated and reused, which can make precise dating decades after the fact a bit tricky. Otherwise, I’ve just had some fun thinking about all these takes on one of my favorite novels. Hopefully you will too.
‣ Google recently updated its logo, apparently:
‣ Iconic YouTuber Miss Rachel, who has been outspoken about the genocide in Gaza, sets an example for every early childhood educator out there:
‣ The most important introduction in the history of friendship:
‣ I just know this is how it went down at the conclave:
Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
